COSATU in Capitalism at its Deadliest

Some worker leaders when challenged about the fact that COSATU and their allies are playing right into the hands of the multinational pharmaceutical industry with their demands for ARV (antiretroviral) drugs are quick to deny it. These comrades then usually claim that they have every good intention to manufacture the drugs themselves rather than to enrich the foreign drug companies. The initiative of CEPPWAWU Investments suggests quite a different reality. COSATU would be wise to carefully reconsider its support for these initiatives in light of developments currently playing themselves out in the High Court of South Africa.

In November 2005 the TAC initiated legal action against the Rath Health Foundation and several prominent individuals, including Advocate Anthony Brink, chairman of the Treatment Information Group (TIG). It appears that the TAC’s strategy in suing them was intended to silence them from challenging the drug industry’s marketing of highly toxic ARV drugs for the treatment of unsuspecting people diagnosed HIV-positive. However, from the contents of Advocate Brink’s startling answering affidavit (pdf, 514 kB) it is clear that the TAC’s strategy has backfired.

In his affidavit Adv Brink provides the evidence that so-called ARV drugs have no health benefits whatsoever, but are in fact deadly cell poisons that can only have devastating results on the health of a person taking them. And Professor Sam Mhlongo’s affidavit (pdf, 31 kB) confirms this. In his affidavit Adv Brink requested the court to issue an order for the performance of the long-awaited research – agreed at the second meeting of President Mbeki’s International AIDS Advisory Panel in 2000 – to determine what the so-called HIV-tests are actually testing for. According to Adv Brink the HIV tests do not really test for a virus called HIV, because such a virus has never been proven to exist. He points out that the tests have been documented to react to more than seventy different, unrelated health conditions, including alcoholic liver disease, flu, flu vaccinations, malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis, hepatitis B vaccination etc. Even past pregnancy can cause the test to react positively and mislead the doctor or nurse doing the test to tell a woman that she is infected with HIV when she isn’t.

For the investment arms of COSATU-affiliated unions to compete successfully against the multinational pharmaceutical industry it will have to connive in developing marketing strategies like those of these corporate criminals. It appears that drug pushers find it much easier to sell their drugs if they can whip up fear for some or other condition that they claim is killing people. If in the process of ‘treating’ those whom they have diagnosed with their newest invented ‘disease’ they proceed to kill off many of these people with toxic ARV drugs, their deaths will seem to confirm to the masses that people really are dying from this new ‘disease’. COSATU should seriously consider whether its role should not rather be to educate its members about these criminal drug marketing strategies rather than aligning themselves with those who are perpetrating these vicious crimes. Johan Beaurain